Professor Malcolm (Doug) Douglas McIlroy

Dr. McIlroy earned his Bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1954, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT in 1959 for his thesis On the Solution of the Differential Equations of Conical Shells. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1958, from 1965-1986 was head of its Computing Techniques Research Department (the birthplace of the Unix operating system), and thereafter was Distinguished Member of Technical Staff. He retired from Bell Labs in 1997, and currently serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Dartmouth College Computer Science Department. As of 2007 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. Dr. McIlroy is best known for having originally developed the Unix pipeline implementation, software componentry and several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr.